Helpdesk

Dear Drugs-Forum readers: We are a small non-profit that runs one of the most read drug information & addiction help websites in the world. We serve over 4 million readers per month, and have costs like all popular websites: servers, hosting, licenses and software. To protect our independence we do not run ads. We take no government funds. We run on donations which average $25. If everyone reading this would donate $5 then this fund raiser would be done in an hour. If Drugs-Forum is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online another year by donating whatever you can today. Donations are currently not sufficient to pay our bills and keep the site up. Your help is most welcome. Thank you.

Drugs killed woman, trial told

an 25, 2008 01:55 PM Peter Edwards
Staff Reporter
A key prosecution witness insists he hasn’t wavered in his view that multimillion-dollar lottery winner Ibi Roncaioli died of a drug overdose, and not alcohol poisoning. The comments by Dr. John Doucet, a forensic pathologist who works with the coroner’s office, came today during an exhaustive peppering of questions by defence lawyer J. David Hobson in Newmarket court.
Hobson is representing Dr. Joseph Roncaioli, 72, who is charged with manslaughter.
Police accuse the Thornhill gynaecologist with injecting his wife Ibi with a fatal cocktail of anesthetics at the family mansion hours before her death on July 20, 2003.
Court has heard that she had 200 millilitres of alcohol in her system, the equivalent of six or seven drinks.
Despite the large amount of alcohol, Doucet told court that he believes she died from a high concentration of the anestheticslidocaine and bupivacaine found in her blood.
Hobson pressed Doucet on whether she would have died from the drugs, even if there wasn’t a high concentration of alcohol in her system.
“I believe so, yes,” he replied.
Doucet said he couldn’t give a precise figure for the amount of the drugs that would have killed her.
“There’s no magic number at which all of a sudden a drug becomes toxic,” he said during his vigorous cross-examination. “There’s a range of those numbers.”
He said it was his responsibility to determine Ibi Roncaioli’s cause of death and that he hasn’t wavered from his initial finding of “multi-drug intoxication.”
He was asked by Hobson why his report noted the presence of ethanol, the chemical name for alcohol.
“I think it’s a contributing factor,” he replied. “… I don’t disagree with my statements then. They’re the same as they are right now.”
The jury has already seen a videotape of a lengthy interview given by Dr. Roncaioli with York Regional Police six months after his wife’s death, in which he said he injected his wife with lidocaine and bupivacaine twice on the day of her death.
He told police that one injection was in the morning and the other later in the day, after a late lunch, during which Ibi Roncaioli had a glass of cognac.
He said he was trying to numb her arm so he could draw blood from her to investigate why she had been feeling poorly for the six months prior to her death.
Court has heard that the Roncaiolis had more than $1-million in debts, even though Ibi Roncaioli won $5 million in a Lotto 6/49 draw in 1991.
The trial continues.